Everything Here Is Beautiful

by Mira T. Lee

  I get her to laugh. But I feel kind of bad. I always thought Jie had a perfect life.

  • • •

  One day in November, I go to the Pig. There’s Manny, bundled in his puffy down coat, huddled on a curb in the parking lot. He’s been demoted. He’s had to bus tables all day.

  “What?” I say.

  One of the other line cooks has accused him of stealing from the pantry.

  “Christ. What did you say?”

  “I said I didn’t do it. Boss believes him. What else can I say?”

  He’s droopy. I’m mad. What the hell, suddenly I’m just so cockfighting mad. “Stealing what?”

  “Ham.”

  “You mean, like, a slice of ham?”

  He sighs. “A big ham. A big whole ham. Jamón.”

  “Jamón?” I picture it, Manny cradling a big whole ham like a football. I can’t help it, I start to laugh.

  “Why are you laughing?” he says.

  I’m laughing so hard I can’t answer.

  “Fuck it,” he says.

  And that’s how it’s decided.

  • • •

  We tough out the rest of winter, knowing we won’t face another. We set a departure date.

  “An exciting adventure!” I say to Essy. “We’re going on an exciting adventure!”

  She believes it. I believe it. “There will be animals,” I say. “Horses and cows and sheep and chickens.”

  “Chickens?” says Essy.

  “Chickens, free-range organic chickens!”

  “With eggs?”

  “Fresh eggs every day!”

  “Hard-boiled.”

  “Sure. Hard-boiled, hija.”

  The floodgate’s opened. The possibilities! But whenever I spring the news to people, it’s the same refrain: For good? Forever? “I’ll come back to visit,” I say.

  I gather documents, file paperwork with the American embassy. I sell our possessions or give them away. Time zips by when there’s so much to do.

  One night I dream of my mother. I’m on a big ship. She’s standing on the shore. We’re the same, Ma! I yell. Don’t you see? We’re the same. We’re not afraid. She doesn’t say anything, but she waves.

  • • •

  On my last day of work, my coworkers from the vitamin job take me out for dinner. We go to a Mexican restaurant, get happy on margaritas and everyone’s all gung ho about my big adventure. When I get home, it’s after midnight, and the house is dark except for the blue glow from the television in our room. Manny is still up, watching a Mexican telenovela. I sit next to him. He switches it off.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I say. “I’ll be asleep in a minute.”

  “Your sister called me today,” he says. Very Serious.

  “My sister? Miranda? From Switzerland?”

  He nods. Something inside my stomach topples over. It starts to churn.

  “She is worried,” he says quietly, and I understand. The truth comes out, of course.

  Jie always used to be on my side, but now all she sees is my illness.

  I brace myself for the lecture. I’m sick, I’m reckless, I’m irresponsible. But to hear Jie’s words come from Manny’s mouth, I can’t help it, the tears spill out of my eyes.

  “It’s okay,” he says. He pulls my head to his shoulder. “I told her it will be okay. I said in Ecuador we can have a good life.”

  I hug him. I cry. I curl up beside him, my rounded back pressed into his chest.

  “We can open our own business,” I say.

  “No boss,” he says.

  “No boss! No more working for the man.”

  “No man. Only me.” He grins.

  “An Internet café. Or a store.”

  “A hardware store. A paint store.”

  “A restaurant. An ecotourist lodge!”

  “Motorcycle rentals.”

  “You can build the huts.”

  “Hut rentals.”

  “Hut rentals!”

  “You spray the bugs. I sit on my ass and collect rent, like landlord Harry.” He laughs.

  We watch the telenovela, trying to make sense of which of the maid’s triplet daughters gave birth to the drug kingpin’s son. Manny holds my hand. He doesn’t say any more, but I find out later he called his Tío Remy, whose daughter works as a nurse in Quito, to make sure they stock my pills.

  • • •

  Bye-bye Vargas house. Bye-bye Mrs. Gutierrez. Bye-bye Coco. Bye-bye Beige. Bye-bye playground. Bye-bye Hudson. Bye-bye Nipa. Bye-bye Natey. Bye-bye Pig. Bye-bye laundromat. Bye-bye Ecuadorian buffet. Bye-bye Main Street. Bye-bye El Pollo Loco. It turns out Essy has no problem saying good-bye.

  The last item left in our room is an old bathroom scale. The rest of our belongings I’ve squeezed into three brand-new suitcases, giant red plaid, the ugliest I could find down on Orchard Street. Each weighs in at just under seventy pounds, and we heave them into the trunk of our yellow cab, all two hundred and ten pounds of our lives. As we drive away, I say to Essy, “Wave, bye-bye house!” And then as our airplane lifts into the sky she says, “Mama, wave again!” Bye-bye Westchester. Bye-bye Manhattan. Bye-bye New York. Bye-bye America.

  Part Two

  5

  Lucia

  The cabin door opens and she’s enveloped by warm, tropical air. It’s dense. Moist. It slicks down her throat, shuttles through her lungs, her veins, to her heart. This is the oxygen, more potent, the well, more pure, this is the new breath, new earth, new air, new life—she is coated with newness inside and out!

  It takes two bus rides to reach the city of Cuenca, a third, slow and bumpy, to reach a tiny town called Martez. Hardly a town, maybe a village, it’s a single road lined with low, boxlike buildings, where women in traditional shawls squat next to buckets, hawking their vegetables. Six eggplants here, six cabbages there, ten avocados, thirty potatoes, a handful of peppers, three watermelons cut from the vine that morning. Freshly harvested, to be eaten the same day, so she pays twenty cents for six guayabas and the abuela hacks one open with a small, rusty hatchet and she sucks sweet pulp to quench her thirst. “Essy, want to try?” Wide-eyed children swarm to greet them, waving plastic bags full of gummies, candy corns, lemon and lime sour balls. “Essy, try this! It’s better than candy.” Manny swats the niños away.

  His Papi arrives in a pickup truck, a battered red Toyota with scratches and dents like it’s been mauled by some foamy-mouthed carnivore. Fredy’s in back, curls big and tangled from the dusty wind, grin so wide it splits his face. He’s got the characteristic look of a Down’s kid: up-slanted eyes, flattened profile, tongue hung like a weary dog. But the way he lights up, leaps out of that truck when he sees his brother, it’s enough. The joy, the love! They must’ve told him so many great things about Manny, the hermano who went to Nueva York like a legend.

  Papi is a plow of a man, solid, tireless, rooted in the earth. Dressed in sleeveless white undershirt, cutoff denim shorts, he’s a darker, heftier, more leathery version of Manny—handsome, with the same boxy face, prominent brow ridges. They shake hands before embracing in that awkward man-to-man way, high up around the shoulders instead of chest to chest.

  “Did you have a good trip?” he asks.

  “A beautiful trip,” she says.

  Fredy offers a green lollipop to Essy, helps unravel the wrapper. Essy can’t take her eyes off him. She points to his belly button, blooping out from under his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt. “Gordito,” she says, and back home Lucia would’ve had to shush and whisk her daughter aside, glance around apologetically, hoping no one overheard. But here Papi and Manny just laugh. Fredy is flabby, porky, obese, for a boy of twelve. Gordito. It’s the truth.

  Papi slings their red plaid suitcases onto the back of the truck, stacks them in a pyramid.

  “You
and niña sit in front,” he says, gesturing to the cab. “The boys in the back.”

  She reaches for Essy’s hand.

  “No, Mama! I want to sit in the back!” Her daughter tugs away, waves her lollipop in the air like it’s a magic wand, slows to aim it straight at Fredy. “With that one.”

  Lucia frowns. Maybe she’s skeptical for a minute, but Manny and Papi don’t bat an eye. So Essy clambers aboard, plops herself in Manny’s lap, and Fredy reclines on the mountain of luggage like it’s a comfy beach chair, points to puffs of clouds in the sky. “Mama, look at me!” says Essy, waving, and Lucia, up front next to Papi, twists and cranes to watch them through the mud-caked window. When they peel out of town, Essy unleashes a scream of joy: “Eeeee-ha!” She screams all the way to Papi’s farm.

  This is her just-turned three-year-old daughter: unbuckled, unharnessed, hurtling down a dirt road on the back of a pickup truck. Her long dark hair flies free in the wind, lashes at her beaming face. Oh, if the mamas from Group could see them now!

  • • •

  Mami greets them at the farm. “Bienvenido a casa! Un abrazo, Lucy.” She’s short, wide-hipped, with a low center of gravity, formidable for her size (unmistakably, a bear). She draws Lucia into her bosom, a cocoon of warmth, a true womanly embrace. “And you, you must be Esperanza.” She drops to her knees. Essy burrows her face into her mother’s legs, until Mami coaxes her out with a piece of honey cake. Mami’s kitchen is spotless; colorful woven baskets hold everything from bread to knives to straws to eggs. On the wall hangs a silver plaque of Madonna and Child next to a Statue of Liberty calendar, days marked off with sturdy red X’s. “Where are Juan and Ricky?” asks Manny. “They’ll come home for lunch,” says Mami, and when they come, they come running, panting with excitement—dashing teens in school uniforms, starched white shirts and long brown trousers. “You’re an old man!” they yell, throwing punches at Manny, who punches them back, and it’s like he’s never been away.

  They are shown to a small bedroom with bright orange walls. The bed, covered with a lacy bedspread, something handmade (knitted or crocheted, she can never tell the difference), the mattress soft but comfortable. She tells Manny she’ll rest her eyes for a minute. It ends up being all night.

  She wakes to the smell of dew, calls of birds, high-pitched hums and chirps of busy insects. No cars, no buses, no screeching sirens, just the clacking throttle of a tractor at work in a distant neighbor’s field. Manny and Essy are both snoring, so she climbs out of bed, drapes Manny’s arm across Essy’s back in case she starts to roll. She slips into a sundress—no more bulky sweaters, no more heavy coats, no more boots! Everyone in the house is still asleep, so she heads outside for a walk. It’s a glorious new day. Everywhere she turns, only big uninterrupted sky, lush green terraces rolling up the hillsides, peaks gently bumping the horizon. She follows a trail through tall grass and is delivered out onto a pasture, freshly cleared, drenched with ripeness, cows and hay. Nature is perennially in bloom in Ecuador, and she feels at ease in its presence; even the traces of smoke and sawdust in the air feel familiar on her skin. In this part of the world, someone is inevitably burning or building something somewhere nearby. She stretches her arms, starts to spin like a child, faster and faster, until the world becomes a kaleidoscopic blur, until she gets so dizzy she must sit down. And then she lies on her back and watches the sky untwist, the clouds unwind, around and around and around.

  Maybe she falls asleep for a minute. Next she’s rubbing her eyes like a fairy-tale princess, biting on her thumb to make sure this isn’t a dream. Trekking back to the house, she smells frying meat. Mami has cooked breakfast—chorizo, eggs and rice with cilantro, guanabana juice, all neatly arranged on the wooden picnic tables outside.

  “You like?” asks Mami. Gestures from the food to the fields to the distant mountains and blue-gray sky.

  “Yes,” she says. “Es muy bonita.”

  “Paradiso.” Mami nods proudly.

  Paradiso. She agrees.

  Querencia.

  • • •

  That weekend, Manny’s parents host a welcome home party. With Mami’s six sisters and Papi’s three brothers and tíos and tías and cousins and a slew of neighbors, too, it feels like more people than she’s known her entire life! They roast a pig, four chickens, half a dozen guinea pigs (cuy, Ecuadorian specialty!), set out soups and tamales and empanadas and llapingachos, four pots of beans and rice. Mami has even baked a belated birthday cake for Essy, decorated with jelly beans and Jell-O and mini-marshmallows. And when they sing, feliz cumpleaños, it’s like a full-on chorus and Essy’s eyes grow round as marbles as she basks in the attention, puffs her cheeks, blows out three candles. Then she’s off with the pack, babies to teenagers, tearing through the house, into the fields, chasing animals, wielding sticks, playing ball games and hide-and-seek. No one worries about bedtime. The moon comes out. Lightning bugs flicker. As the night wears on, men slam shots of aguardiente. The older generation favors plaid button-down shirts, the younger sports neon tracksuits. Drunker and drunker, bolder and sloppier on the dance floor, and Manny mops his forehead as he loosens his hips, passes from tías to cousins to chicas with tight strappy tops and wedge heels and miniskirts. He is a smooth dancer, with an easy lead, hand in the small of the woman’s back. Lucia dances with the neighbor, Roberto, who sprays saliva into her ear as he sings, and then Tío Remy, who asks questions as he spins her around. Te gusta el campo? Te gusta nuestro país? Does she like Chinese food? When he lived in Quito he had a lady friend who was Chinese, an excellent cook who had very soft hands.

  She is winded. The air is thin and her red blood cells haven’t adjusted to the new oxygen levels yet, so she breaks away to mingle with the older women, who shout to be heard above the deep thuds of reggaeton and tecnocumbia. “I am Sylvia’s cousin,” they all seem to say, and it’s as Manny once said: he has enough tíos and tías and cousins to populate an entire village. Is that Esperanza? Qué linda! Will you have more? You must have more. They pat their bellies. She knows they’re not referring to a second helping of flan.

  Next morning, she and Essy are the first to wake. She is disoriented; the kitchen has been left in complete disarray. She washes dishes, pots, wipes down the table. Then she boils water in Mami’s stainless steel kettle, brews herself a cup of hot tea. Soon Mami appears in pink bathrobe and clear plastic slippers. “Buenos días,” she says, and Essy giggles, points to the rollers in Abuela’s hair. Mami shoos them out of the kitchen; party or no party, it’s time to prepare the next meal.

  They eat breakfast outside. Scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, naran-jillas and plantains. When they’re finished, Papi stands at the head of the table, broad gummy smile stretching from ear to ear, parenthetical grooves carved into his face. She sees that smile in Manny and his three brothers, an unmistakable family inheritance. She sees it in Essy, too.

  “We have something,” he announces. He nods to her. “For you.”

  “Me?”

  “For welcome,” he says.

  Caught off guard, she glances at Manny, who’s looking away. Papi leads, they follow. Through the campo, past Mami’s vegetable garden, an old barn, a field of lazy goats, past a meadow, a trickling brook, down a steep hill of wildflowers, up a winding dirt path. They walk for ten minutes, maybe more, Essy perched atop Manny’s shoulders. At the end of the dirt path, a flat clearing, and behind it rises a lush, green mountain. They stop.

  Mami’s crinkly eyes, smiling. Papi, all teeth, like the Cheshire cat.

  “What is it?” she says.

  • • •

  It’s a small casita. A house shaped exactly the way a young child draws a house: a triangle on top of a rectangle, inside the rectangle, two squares. Built from chalky wood beams, tin sheets for a roof, packed dirt for floors. In the kitchen area, a sink, a double-burner stove, a metal table with three folding chairs. On the wall hangs a calen
dar supplied by a local gas company, next to a gold-framed picture of Jesus Christ. In the bedroom, a queen-size bed with another lacy bedspread, a wooden desk, wire shelves, a high-backed rocking chair. Mami has sewn curtains, flowery pink with three tiers of ruffles like a young girl’s dress, which artfully adorn the gaping window holes.

  “It’s simple,” says Mami.

  “There is no toilet yet,” Papi apologizes. He hasn’t had time to build an outhouse, but he will get to it soon.

  “For now you can come to the house,” says Mami. “Or . . .” She gestures toward the trees.

  “You like it?” says Papi.

  All eyes on her. Her palms sweat. She doesn’t know what to say. It takes several moments before she fully comprehends that this house is for her, for them, for their little family. They are to live here, on this land, in this spot, at the foot of this mountain. For now. For how long. Forever? She swallows, unsure of what this means.

  She has traveled in this country before, seen the shanties where families live in cardboard shacks and piss in buckets. With a parcel of arable land, a water source, Manny’s family is not poor like this, but she is certain they are far from rich.

  She says, “This is so generous. Thank you.”

  Mami beams.

  They move into their new home later that day. She unpacks their red plaid suitcases.

  “What do you think?” says Manny, in bed that night, their daughter asleep between them. And she surveys the lacy bedspread by their feet, the neat stacks of clothing she has organized onto their wire shelves (His. Hers. Essy’s), the pink ruffled curtains now drawn closed.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says.

  “Temporary,” he says. “I will build us a house, a good one. I promise.” He reaches over to caress her breasts.

  • • •

  Early the next morning, he goes with Papi to buy tools. They need to cut trees, clear brush behind the casita. She sets off with Essy to visit the main house again. The child runs ahead, her ability to find her way as instinctual as her easy, graceful gait. Gifts. Her daughter, with so many gifts! As they approach, she sees Mama and Tía Camila through the kitchen window. Camila is Mami’s oldest sister, the same stocky shape. Mami waves. Fredy is in the garden, feeding the chickens. Essy runs to join him.